Best way to transfer OS to SSD?

Question

I am running out of hard drive space due to installing too many games from various giveaways over the last two years.

I went to install a second hard drive, only to find that there is no bay for a second conventional hard drive and no place to put/mount the second drive even though there are two free SATA ports and an extra SATA power port. Strange.

There is a slot for an M2 drive, so I exchanged the 4tb drive for a 1tb m2 drive.

The existing drive is 1.5tb and has less than 50gb free.

However now I'm faced with the issue. The OS is on the OEM 1.5tb drive, but the SSD is much faster. What's the best way to transfer my copy of Windows 10 Pro to the new hard drive?

Most of the methods I looked up suggest making an image, but I don't have enough free space to do that, and there is no way to copy a 1.5tb image onto a 1tb drive.

If I install Windows 10 from scratch, would activation be an issue? I'd really rather not do that as I mentioned there are a lot of games that need to be downloaded and installed (Epic doesn't let you save an offline copy for something like this) that would probably put me over the 250gb/month bandwith limit my ISP has.

Any suggestions do do I need to bite the bullet and get out my Restore USB drive?

For that matter, will I have trouble with activation? I did not link my Microsoft account to my user account as I didn't want all the tracking and ads. Obviously this means I didn't link the product key/license to a Microsoft account either as I did NOT want a Microsoft account. Especially since those aren't as easy to integrate into my network with a legacy WinXP and Win7 computer on it. With all other computers since win95, I just use the same user account and they automatically work.

Answer 1

Dear SlickRCBD,

I'm Dyari. Thanks for reaching out. I will be happy to assist you in this regard.

1-Unfortunately, Microsoft does not have any tool or utility to clone a hard drive and transfer the operating system to the new SDD. Therefore, you should perform a clean install then re-install all of your software and games, or, you can use third-party software to clone the OS like Macrium Reflect:

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-clone-your-p...

2-Since your Windows is activated now, no need to buy a new license key, the current one should activate Windows automatically. When you do a clean install, the license information is automatically picked up from Microsoft activation servers. Windows will activate your Windows license from this information.

If it does not activate it automatically, go to Settings > Activation > Troubleshoot

Please let me know if you need further assistance and keep me updated.

____________________________________________________________

Standard Disclaimer: There are links to non-Microsoft websites. The pages appear to be providing accurate, safe information. Watch out for ads on the sites that may advertise products frequently classified as a PUP (Potentially Unwanted Products). Thoroughly research any product advertised on the sites before you decide to download and install it.

Answer 2

Is it wrong that I kinda want to go back to MS-DOS at this point?

Then all I'd have to do is

[code]

fdisk D:

format d: /s /v

sys d:

XCOPY c:\DOS d: /e /y

XCOPY C:\PROG D: /e /y

XCOPY c:\GAMES D: /e /y

[/code]

and it would work.

Obviously for Win95 and later \prog would be \Program Files\ or \Program Files (x86)\

The Games folder actually came back with Vista for some games that don't work in Program Files due to the protections introduced in Vista.

Unfortunately just copying the files doesn't work in Windows 95 and later even if you do a basic install of the OS on the new drive, then try to XCOPY everything from the old drive (I haven't tried this with Windows Vista or later, but I did try it with XP).

Answer 3

Hi SlickRCBD,

I am afraid that this command does not work for transferring installed software from a computer to another one because the installed program relies on other support structures. Directories, libraries, configuration and data files could so be critical to execution. Without them, the program may fail to run or start.

Also, it may need a license that ties it to the MAC address which is different from a PC to another.

Please let me know if you need further assistance.

Stay safe

Answer 4

I was making a joke because I once transferred somebody's system (I don't recall if it was Uncle John's or one of his son's who were still teenagers) to a larger hard drive back under MS-DOS 5. by disconnecting the CD-ROM, installing the new hard drive as a D Drive slave, formatting it with /S, and using XCOPY C:\ D: /e overnight, then pulling out both hard drives and resetting the D drive as a master and hooking the CD-ROM back up. Back then they only had one [p]ATA IDE controller on the system. No secondary IDE.

Sorry if it wasn't obvious I was making a joke about longing for the days of MS-DOS when it was simple.

In any case, you said different MAC addresses. That would be irrelevant here because I simply installed the new hard drive in the PCIe M2 slot in the same computer and just want to make it the boot drive and run the OS and programs from it, while using the built in conventional hard drive only for data.

Seems I'll have to start from scratch. Every other time I've made a D drive it was only for data, and I left the original for OS and programs (and usually user folders since moving that to a D drive is a pain since some programs don't like it not being on the C drive, but I'd make sure to transfer AMAP to the D drive).

Looks like I'm going to have to do it the long and slow way, install Windows from scratch and then slowly reinstall over the games over the course of months because of bandwith limits. To think I dreaded spending two days a decade ago reinstalling from CDs & DVDs. Isn't digital downloads with only stub installers a great improvement?